Access to Funding: Arts NSW

On March 21 M&G NSW, in partnership with the Museum of the Riverina, presented Access to Funding, a workshop delivering skills to make accessing funds a reality. Below are the presentations from the federal organisations.

Gabrielle Eade Acting Manager, Funding Programs Visual Arts, Museums, Major Festivals, Literature and New MediaArts NSW

Gabrielle is currently A/Manager, Funding Programs, at Arts NSW, working across a range of areas including Visual Arts, Museums, Major Festivals, Literature, History and New Media.

Arts NSW is the NSW Government’s arts funding and policy body. Through the Arts Funding Program the NSW Government offers a range of opportunities that support artists and arts and cultural organisations in NSW.

This presentation will introduce the Arts NSW Arts Funding Program, including a range of devolved funding programs which offer alternative opportunities for volunteer run organisations, galleries and museums, and offer tips and advice on how to apply for funding.

Museums Australia National Conference 2013

Museums Work: people, industry and nation at the

National Convention Centre, Canberra

Sculptor Patricia Piccinini takes her art to the skies, constructing a hot air
balloon in the shape of a whale, in honour of Canberra's centenary.

The impact of ‘megatrends’, international careers forged by Australian museum professionals, the amazing West Kowloon development in Hong Kong and Patricia Piccinini’s huge ‘Skywhale’ hot air balloon, were among the highlights of Museums Australia’s recent 2013 national conference held in Canberra on the weekend of May 17-20.

Regional Remote and Community Day

400 eager delegates representing all states and territories were registered across the 4 day conference. It commenced with the dedicated Regional Remote and Community Day (Friday 17), which included plenary presentations about the Buriganyja Wanggaya, Old People Talking Project from the Gascoyne Region of WA and an outline of record breaking programs run by the Bendigo Art Gallery.

To mark international museums day, the conference remained in plenary format throughout Saturday. Robyn Archer gave the first keynote reminding all that in celebrating ‘the past’ we should always connect to the present and future. All agreed that Robyn’s ‘SkyWhale’ commission for the Centenary of Canberra admirably illustrated her point.

Indigenous voices

Social Justice Campaigner and an elder from the Iwaidja tribal group (south-west Darwin/ Coburg Peninsula), Dr Tom Calma, connected all present with his call to create opportunities for Indigenous voices and stories to be heard. As Race Discrimination Commissioner, Dr Calma worked to advance Australia as an inclusive society. His keynote sought to highlight many successes and some key challenges for museums to continue their partnerships with indigenous Australians towards achieving reconciliation and respect.

Michael Brand

Michael Brand followed with a personal account of his career to date. In reflecting on his professional journey, Michael discussed his time as Director of the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and referred briefly to the spark provided by his visit to Fatehpur Sikri, a city built just west of Agra in India, during the second half of the 16th century, by Emperor Akbar. It was abandoned some 15 years later due to a poor water supply and remains one of India’s most extraordinary examples of Mughal architecture.

Michael Lynch

There is no doubt that Michael Lynch has had a remarkable career. Having held leadership roles with the Sydney Opera House, the Australia Council & London’s Southbank Centre, he enthralled all with an outline of his current preoccupation, development of the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong. His presentation focussed on the ambitious M + component of the project – as a game changer for museums in the 21st century.

Megatrends

Megatrends got their airing in a fascinating keynote given by Dr Stephan Hajkowicz, a principal scientist with the CSIRO. Drawing on their ‘Our Future World’ report, Hajkowicz outlined key social, economic and environmental changes to be faced over the next decade under the following six identified megatrends – More From Less, Great Expectations, Going, Going, Gone, Virtually Here, Forever Young & The Silk Highway. 

Dr Brendan Nelson

The final Keynote provided delegates with an ‘outsiders’ view from a newcomer to the museum industry. Dr Brendan Nelson has had a distinguished career in public service, serving as a minister in two terms of the Howard Government. He passionately spoke about his new role as Director of the Australian War Memorial and of his deep conviction that Australia’s history is everything to do with its future.

As a networking opportunity and as a chance to re-charge professional batteries, How Museums Work: people, industry and nation was a great success and testament to outgoing MA President, Andrew Sayer’s vision for and contribution to, museums and galleries, large and small.

This post has no title. Purposely.

Image courtesy of Capture Queen via FlickaCC

And the reason why this post has no title is so that you don’t click on something else when you know what it’s about. So I’ll say it really quickly: DigitalOnlineTools. There! Relatively painless— even though I know your finger is, at this moment poised, ready to make the exit click―so wait! Before you leave, consider these few questions.

Have you ever needed to create a pic for your newsletter? Want to crop, rotate, add a speech bubble easily and quickly and you don’t own Adobe Creative Suite? Or perhaps you need an editor for the new catalogue or a designer for the annual report? … If we've got your attention now, then keep on reading.

Here at M&GNSW, we've been at the Navigating Not-for-Profits in the new world conference. Hosted by Connecting Up, an organisation who specialise in supporting the not-for-profit sector, this year’s conference was about learning to thrive in a digital world.

There were lots of great sessions but one of the main discussion streams was about the abundance of free digital tools. A digital tool is simply one that relies on the internet to exist. The term itself is kind of meaningless (with added ‘yawn’ factor) and so is often broken down into things like online marketing tools, online accounting tools and so on.

Nevertheless, this digital online world of ours is producing some really fun and useful things— the market is a fast growing and highly competitive one and we, the consumers are spoilt for choice as pimply geek coders and software engineers jostle for our customer loyalty. There’s almost nothing that you can’t find online and much of it is open-source and some of it free.

So don’t be daunted— all it takes is a couple of hours to explore and experiment. Have a look at these, they’re some our favourites.

Doodle is a scheduling tool which does what Outlook doesn't do well.

easel.ly lets you create very cool info-graphics.

Freelancer is an online editing and transcription service which works where editors bid on your proposed job.

Pixilr provides creative online photo editing without the need for Photoshop.

Vine is a mobile app that enables it’s users to create and post video clips. Video clips created with Vine have a maximum length of 6 seconds and can be shared or embedded on social networking services such as Twitter.

Join me is an online meeting tool which combines instant screen sharing and powerful meeting tools in an app that anyone can use.

Wrike is an online project management platform similar to Basecamp and Redmine.

Wordle If you are like tag clouds for your website, this is for you.

Camtasia helps you create professional videos – use it to record on-screen activity, customise and edit content and then share your videos with anyone across most devices and platforms.

Slideshare provides links to lots of other sites which specialise in helping you tell your stories.

We’ve also got a long list of the online analytic tools as well, but at risk of exhausting you, we’ll save the next bunch for another day.

Carole 

Museum of Sydney: Video Encounters

At Museum of Sydney on Friday 10 May delegates converged both physically and virtually for Video Encounters to witness some of the best videoconferencing experiences Australia has to offer in the one half day seminar.

Below, Karen Player and Ben Newsome introduce how video conferencing technology can be used.

Karen Player - Museum Outreach Coordinator - Australian Museum

Karen has a background in environmental science and education. She is committed to outreach programs throughout NSW and beyond. Karen has worked at the Australian Museum for the last 14 years in education and interpretive roles. Karen has been coordinating video conferencing programs for the last three years. Last year the Museum presented video conferencing events to 7,500 students from 200 schools across the state. Karen is the chair of Virtual Excursions Australia, a professional video conferencing network of over 30 educational content providers.

Ben Newsome - Director - Fizzics Education

Ben has run hundreds of video conferences for schools across Australia and around the world since 2010. He will discuss how free apps can link iPads, smart phones and desktop computers to traditional video conferencing equipment so you can video conference without the equipment. Additionally this session covers how Fizzics Education is using these apps to support science clubs in schools and libraries.

Note: this presentation is made up of the video grid below. In the left hand top corner is Ben presenting to the audience, while around him are various staff using traditional video conferencing technology (top right) and mobile technology in the videos below.

We're building a website:The new public homepage

For the last three months I've banged on about the following things:

The general online strategy: Connecting assets to audience via content

Users and user experience

Communication between developers and clients: Wireframes and use cases

The design process

As we prepare to start working with you to upload information into our directory its time to stop being coy and start showing you exactly what the new website will look like and exactly what it will do. 

The public facing site

By now you're familiar with how the website will split in two based on audience: we have the "public facing" part that aggregates the variety of museums, galleries and Aboriginal cultural centres with your exhibitions and events, and trails defined by geography and theme. These trails will be based on existing tourism trails, local council heritage trails and independent journeys described by regional stories. Then there is the "sector facing" site that provides a hub for news, events, services and funding pertinent to the sector.

The magazine content

The homepage is the combination of everything the sector offers. In particular, it provides "magazine" articles to personalise the sector and connect your places with the greater community. These articles will structure the body of the public facing homepage.

The homepage structure

The page is split into three areas: 

- the horizontal navigation;

- the vertical side bar highlighting specific content in relation to the directory, trails   and events plus ways of contacting us (email, twitter, sign up to our e-newsletter);

- the main body featuring stories, articles, interviews, opinion pieces and news.

Horizontal Navigation 

First thing you might notice. Our name has changed.

What does the "of" signify? It's such a little change what does it matter. Well, adding "of" removes some of the government-speak feel of our name. It also goes some way to describing, in very simple terms, what's "in the box". We could have given the public facing site a magazine-style name but why make the user think. 

Click on the sector button and you immediately get access to the second half of our website - the SECTOR side (more on that in a fortnight).  



The navigation is split into our five offers:

These are also mirrored in the side bar, that, like the horizontal navigation appears on every page. 

The side bar

You may wonder why its important to have the side navigation mirroring the horizontal navigation? We asked the same thing and Adrian Wiggins from Pure and Applied (who did our website research) provided the following explanation:

"We only have a moment to connect

Most people will look at our site for less than 10 seconds, and at just one page. We need to do all we can to connect with these people, to reveal our content and features, and win them over to staying 10-20 seconds and looking at a second page. For these people we need to make our site self-evident – it's to our advantage to say the same thing several ways – it builds confidence.

We're providing multiple alternate paths for different exploration styles

When we repeat things in different modes or expressions we're catering to people's different ways of exploring, and avoiding the moment where they can't make sense of things or find a way forward. Here we're catering to several different navigation styles – readers, navigators, searchers. It's hard to say with any certainty how our visitors break down into these categories, so it's just prudential common sense to provide mechanisms for all.

• Readers consume text or visual content to understand the site; 
• Navigators understand a site by parsing the navigation and using it to explore; 
• Searchers use site search tools for particular objectives."

The body of the homepage

The body of the website homepage is made up of modules leading users to an article about a place, event, exhibition or trail. These articles are tagged under umbrella titles such as Treasures (stories about the objects, collections and the people who look after them) or State of the Art (interviews with artists or curators). 

These tags also provide the sub-navigation for the homepage. Click on any one of these tags and you will be taken to a landing page listing all the articles under that umbrella title. 

Why tagging?

We want to follow the lead of our users. Instead of an unchanging navigation we want to measure user engagement with subjects and strengthen the representation of popular content. If the public can't get enough of WWI next year then we'll make this a tagged subject heading on the front page.

In a fortnight, I'll introduce your organisational profile page.  

Access to Funding: VIM Grants

On March 21 M&G NSW, in partnership with the Museum of the Riverina, presented Access to Funding, a workshop delivering skills to make accessing funds a reality. 

Phoebe Arthur
Museum Programs & Collections Coordinator Museums & Galleries NSW 

Phoebe coordinates the Volunteer Initiated Museum (VIM) grant program, including Small Grants, Development Project Grants and Skills Development Grants for volunteer-managed museums. She is also responsible for the delivery of the Standards Review Program, a development program that has so far worked with 89 participating museums across NSW. 

Volunteer Initiated Museum (VIM) Grant Program

The Volunteer Initiated Museum (VIM) Grant Program provides assistance to volunteer-initiated community museums and keeping places in NSW. The VIM Program encourages museum volunteers to build their skills and confidence in both project management and grant applications, by undertaking progressively more complex projects.

The VIM Grant Program is an Arts NSW devolved funding program, administered by Museums & Galleries NSW on behalf of the NSW Government.

We're building a website: What makes good design?

When we last talked about design Toben had presented a preliminary set of concepts and we chose the 'magazine' style layout and "finding the way" as an overall design concept to lead specific elements of the design.

Based on our decisions, Toben delivered the following design ideas. 

They expanded our brand colour palette so we could choose more than pink, green and blue. Not only our website but all our marketing and designed collateral can shift from the existing modern, corporate qualities to a warmer experience (yay!)

 They suggested how the colours could harmonise. 

They suggested design elements based on "wayfinding" and tourism "brown signs". 

And they began to look at how these various elements would come together to display designed, aggregated modules-

And designed interactive features. For example, if the user rolls over a carousel/slideshow item the arrow pushes out with information on it. 

Last week, I asked what designers do in the website building process. Another question I've asked myself constantly in this process is what makes good design? 

Folded into Toben's visual response is research about our sector, about our audience (those we have and those we want to reach) and a clear understanding of our brand, and its potential to influence and engage the public. On top of this Toben needs to consider technical requirements, the user experience and information architecture.

Good design is doing all of the above and making it look easy. 

In the next blog, as we gear up to begin populating the site with your content, we'll take a look at the designed homepages and organisation profile pages.